Day 1 - Monday 3rd October 2011
Designing With Agile: Fast, Effective UX Methods That Work
with Anders Ramsay

Overview

Agile represents a huge shift from waterfall and other traditional approaches to software development, and UX practitioners have realised they need to adapt their traditional methods accordingly.

In this intensive full-day workshop, you'll learn both how to be a successful UX practitioner within an Agile team, and how to improve your own UX methodology (even if you're not in an Agile environment) through Agile practices. After completing it, you'll have a crisp mental model of how the Agile project game is played and where UX fits in.

Workshop outline

To fully understand and take advantage of Agile's power, you have to experience it first-hand. This workshop will simulate key points of a UX practitioner's journey through an Agile project. We'll divide into teams and work in mini-versions of Agile project environments. In our "team rooms," we'll work through project activities that both reveal Agile thinking and offer practical value when you return to your real-world work. Activities we'll tackle or discuss may include:

Product Visioning

Agile Personas

Paired Interviews

Design Studio

Story Mapping

Minimum Viable Product

UX Planning Board

Cross-functional Pairing

User Fridays

Getting to Done (and beyond)

We'll intersperse activities with group discussion, and conclude the day by conducting a Retrospective (an important Agile practice) during which participants reflect on the project journey and share insights.

What you'll learn

An improved understanding of Agile thinking and how to apply it to UX practice

Fast and effective UX methods you can start applying immediately in your project work

Who should attend

This workshop targets User Experience practitioners. It will also be valuable to product managers, visual designers, or anyone with experience designing software products who wants to integrate Agile methods into their work.